The past few weeks have been fucking killing me at work. It’s the busiest month of the year, and two people from my team left at the start of the month. I get home and am a dead thing, too tired to move or think. This on top of having to look for a place and move. It doesn’t stop there, because next week the Fall semester starts, which is another busy time at work! This ‘day job I can stand’ has turned into what every day job I’ve ever had has been: soul-crushing.
There. That said, I, like thousands of years of Christian peasants, am enduring the hardships of the present in hope of future pleasures. (I should point out that I am not a Christian peasant.) I have made a solemn vow to myself that by this month next year, I will be ready to quit full time day jobs forever and be supported solely by creative work. It’s a tall order for 12 months, coming off of years of creative paralysis, but not impossible.
To jump-start me from the scattered stories and sketches that I do now to producing finished work, I will write two novels by the end of the year. September and October I’ll be writing a zombie novel, and if it doesn’t suck I’ll be submitting it for publication. Then in November, I’ll participate in NaNoWriMo, probably fleshing out a sci-fi short I wrote this past weekend. Whether I deem them worthy of submission or not, I will start and finish in the time specified.
Then in December I’ll take it easy a bit, and begin prep work for a webcomic opus I’ve had brewing in my head for awhile. In January I’ll do a shorter piece to practice, a webcomic I’ll update every weekday in January based on a fragment I sketched out last year (which is indebted to Peter Blegvad’s Leviathan, although it is nothing like it, and an abandoned storefront I liked walking by in Berkeley.)
This implies that during January I’ll be in the process of rebuilding my comic/art site (currently down) to prepare for the webcomic I’ll start in Feb/March (depending on website stuff) which I’ll update two times a week (maybe more once it gets rolling). FOREVER.
All this is assuming that I have no major impactful life changes and do not win the lottery, in which case all of these things will still happen, but the schedule will get wonky due to my touring the world in luxury.
Let me know if you want to help edit some novels, build a website about my work, or support me financially for years. Should I win the lottery and am able to take companions on my travels around the world, I’ll let you know.
